Perhaps no other sector in the world was affected so adversely after the communication revolution in the last three decades as the postal sector. The days of private mails carried and delivered by the post office are a matter of the past now and the young adults of Generation Z may not have experienced the charm of receiving a handwritten postcard, Inland Letter or Aerogramme from the near and dear ones. Many must wonder what the postal employees are doing when their main function has ceased to exist, and how the organizations all over the world are surviving. Interestingly many postal corporations in the world are doing fairly well in terms of their profitability. Market value of their shares increased in recent years, some are paying consistent dividends to shareholders.

Deutsche Post AG (Germany), La Poste (France), Royal Mail (UK) and Post NL (Netherlands) and Japan Post have many success stories. These companies have repositioned themselves and instead of traditional mails, they are primarily focusing on eCommerce and logistics and leveraging their physical presence everywhere. The Post Office in India is also trying to reinvent itself and many incremental changes have been observed in recent decades. The working strength of India Post today is a little over 400,000 which was 600,000 a couple of decades back.

Advertisement

On city roads one rarely comes across the age-old Letter Boxes for collection of mails. Smaller post offices no longer bother to maintain essential postal stationery like postcards as there is hardly any demand. Delivery of unregistered mail, whatever is left, has alrea – dy turned out to be quite erratic. If there was no universal service obligation, perhaps by this time the government would have discontinued such services. In their effort to reposition the Post Office, a new set of Rules and Regulations (December 2024) were brought out by India Post to replace the old ones prevailing since 1933. The new Post Office Regulations highlight operational aspects of various services. The “book packet”, “pattern and sample packet” and “book packet containing printed books”, have all been subsumed in one product namely “Book Post”.

Any item containing books, magazines, journals, greeting cards, invitation cards etc. will all now be transmitted by post as “Book post” under a uniform tariff structure. Different rates that applied earlier based on subjective classification of Book Packets have been done away with. This measure will help in streamlining operational complexities and in rationalizing costs, though expenses of sending printed books form one place to another has increased substantially in the new tariff structure. Earlier concessional rates of postage were applied for printed books and such concessions were important to smaller publishers and distributors of books. Postal articles earlier classified as “Book packet containing periodicals” are now renamed as Periodical Post.

Any publication brought out, printed or published in India and covered under the definition of the term “periodical” under the Press and Registration of Periodical Act (2023) will come under the category of “Periodical Post”. For periodicals which are covered under the definition of “newspaper” and where the owner wishes to avail concessional rate of postage, a separate postal registration is required to be taken as was done earlier. Any periodical which has at least 500 bona fide subscribers and is posted with minimum 500 copies at a time will be treated as “Magazine post” with a tariff structure separate from that of “Periodical Post”. Every article under “Magazine Post” shall be delivered to the addressee under record and the publisher or his agent has the option to avail the “Book Now Pay Later” scheme, a facility usually made available to contractual customers of Speed Post.

The rates are quite low if delivery is affected within the municipal limits. Since many magazines have a subscriber base in the local area, the new service will be of help to them. Registration has been made compulsory for parcels of any weight slab with track and trace features to promote ease of doing business for e-Commerce operators. Earlier registration was optional for parcels weighing less than 2 kg. This measure will bring the standard of service of small postal parcels at par with the Express Industry. Registered Parcel is now named as “India Post Parcel Retail”. A parcel service specially designed for business customers, where a company enters into a contract with India Post to send a large volume of parcels at a negotiated price will now be known as “India Post Parcel Contractual”.

The new contractual parcel service has made the erstwhile Express Parcels redundant. The new regulation is silent about Express Parcel Post, presumably because the product exhausted its shelf life. Speed Post was earlier res – tricted to an exclusive network of selected cities of the country. About a decade and a half back when booking and delivery were made universal, that exclusivity was lost. In the new scenario Speed Post is repositioned as a superior brand of Registered Post. Certain services viz. “Bill Post” have no relevance in the present age where people hardly wait to receive bills of utility services by post. The new regulation is silent about this service which was introduced with much fanfare about two decades back. Same is the fate of the Competition Postcards ~ a popular product for commercial TV shows in the 1990s.

Recently the UK government approved the sale of Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distribution Services to a Czech billionaire. This will lead to the postal service in Britain passing to foreign ownership. It is too early to assess the impact of such a big decision in the long run but many postal administrations in different parts of the world are going ahead with major structural reforms. Indian democracy is perhaps not prepared for such big ticket changes in the postal sector. We can hardly afford to shy away from rationalization of the network of post offices in cities and bigger towns. Do we really need a non-delivery Town Sub Post Office in every nook and corner of the city? Merger of these offices with nearby bigger offices will not only reduce expenses, it will facilitate better management of the network and improved quality control. We need to introspect and act.

Customer base of India Post today is limited today to individual users and government agencies, viz. courts, passport offices, Income Tax department, Election Commission, Census department, Public Service Commissions, government-run school boards, promotional publications of State governments etc. The corporate sector, small and medium-sized business establishments, banks and financial organizations have shifted their loyalty primarily to the private couriers for quite some time. Today India Post’s earnings from all sources together covers 37 per cent of its expenses and a deficit of more than Rs. 20,000 crore is met by government grant. In that perspective, don’t we need to enforce superfluous expenses more vigorously?

(The writer is a former civil servant)